The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (36 page)

Kierkegaard Turns from History to Existence

Seekers would be slow to turn their quest for meaning from the group to the individual—from history to existence. The prophet of what would be called Existentialism would arise on the periphery of European civilization, in the vanguard of theology, philosophy, and literature for the mid-twentieth century. This anti-ideology insisted on the individual concrete nature of experience. And experience became a name for personal problems.

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was born in Copenhagen to a father who had risen from dire poverty as a tenant farmer to become rich enough to leave Søren a fortune to support him in a life of writing. Two traumatic personal experiences seemed to dominate his personal consciousness and infected him with an obsessive sense of guilt. Søren’s father, as a boy, had been so outraged by his penury as a tenant farmer’s helper that he had stood on a hill in western Jutland and cursed God. Father and son believed that this had brought a curse on the whole family, causing the death of Søren’s mother and five of his six brothers and sisters. His other obsession was a sense of guilt he brought on himself. At the death of his father, when he was studying theology at the University of Copenhagen, he fell in love with the young Regine Olsen. He proposed marriage to her and she accepted. Then, realizing the gulf between her innocence and his guilt-ridden sophistication, he broke off the engagement. “I was a thousand years too old for her,” he wrote in his diary. He fled to Berlin, where, at the age of thirty, he wrote his first and most important book,
Either/Or
(1843). A philosophic explanation of his withdrawal, it has been called the longest love letter ever written—and is also the most cryptic. Regine became engaged to someone else. And
Either/Or
became the Bible of modern Existentialism.

Kierkegaard went on to write many books, all somehow haunted by his sense of guilt and his search for subjectivity. In one of his later books (
Concluding Unscientific Postscript,
1846), which might have been a manifesto for the Existentialists, he eloquently explained the reason—even the necessity—for his work:

The more the collective idea comes to dominate even the ordinary consciousness, the more forbidding seems the transition to becoming a particular existing human being instead of losing oneself in the race, and saying, “we, our age, the nineteenth century.” That it is a little thing merely to be a particular existing human being is not to be denied; but for this very reason it requires considerable resignation not to make light of it. For what does a mere individual count for? Our age knows only too well how little it is, but here also lies the specific immorality of the age. Each age has its own characteristic depravity. Ours is perhaps not pleasure or indulgence of sensuality, but rather a dissolute pantheistic contempt for the individual man. . . . Everything must attach itself so as to be a part of some movement; men are determined to lose themselves in the totality of things, in world history, fascinated and deceived by a magic witchery; no one wants to be an individual human being.

The spiritual poison against which Kierkegaard would provide his Existentialist tonic and antidote was G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), whose philosophy of the absolute was dominating Western European thought in the early nineteenth century. Hegel’s view of the world, of history, and the individual, as we have seen, had an appealing coherence and unity. He argued that only in the institutions, activities, and destiny of his people did the individual find a universal life, into which he incorporated himself. Hegel devoted his life to trying to prove that the universe was a systematic whole. And understandably Hegel’s philosophy has appealed to many thinkers in their youth, as it did to young Kierkegaard, after he had given up Christianity. But Kierkegaard soon took an opposite view. And much of his writing became a polemic against Hegel’s disregard of the individual and of the ethical.

Kierkegaard’s subjectivity took bizarre forms. His numerous publications fell into two classes. Many, including those that were most characteristic and most cryptic, and that became most famous, were published under several different pseudonyms. His publications were as prodigious as they were ambiguous. On October 16, 1843, when he had just reached forty years of age, three of his books appeared, each by a different “author,” but all really by Kierkegaard. In addition to his pseudonymous books, which have given him his historic character, many appeared under his own name in a series that he called
Edifying Discourses.
Dedicated to the memory of his father, these homilies take off from a biblical text, on familiar topics like “Man’s Need of God” and “The Unchangeableness of God.” Kierkegaard insisted that these were “discourses” and not “sermons.” For sermons had the stamp of authority, “that of Holy Writ and of Christ’s Apostles.” Kierkegaard was troubled by the erratic public response to his writings. “I held out
Either/Or
to the world in my left hand and in my right the
Two Edifying Discourses;
but all, or as good as all, grasped with their right what I held in my left.”

Though Kierkegaard insisted on the distinctive individuality of each existing self, he remained curiously ambiguous about his own true self. Perhaps we do not take seriously enough Kierkegaard’s sense of humor. In
Either/Or
he relates that he had been taken up into the seventh heaven where the assembled gods gave him the privilege of making any wish, which they would fulfill.

For a moment I was at a loss. Then I addressed myself to the gods as follows: “Most honorable contemporaries, I choose this one thing, that I may always have the laugh on my side.” Not one of the gods said a word; on the contrary, they all began to laugh. From that I concluded that my wish was granted, and found that the gods knew how to express themselves with taste; for it would hardly have been suitable for them to have answered gravely: “Thy wish is granted.”

Kierkegaard’s wit is easier to grasp than his message. Montaigne, also a forerunner of Existentialism, had explained the problem: “If my mind could gain a foothold, I would not write essays, I would make decisions: But it is always in apprenticeship and on trial.”

Yet we need not be troubled by our inability to sum up and make Kierkegaard’s message intelligible, for his anti-Hegelian argument is that it is not possible to understand existence intellectually. So there can never be a system for existence, because existence is always incomplete and developing. “There is no such thing as repetition,” he insisted as he reached for the uniqueness of each individual and each moment of existence. Yet the illusion of repetition explains much.

The tedium of life requires the intervening acts of the arbitrary existing self, as he explained in
Either/Or:

What wonder, then, that the world goes from bad to worse, and that its evils increase more and more, as boredom increases, and boredom is the root of all evil. The history of this can be traced from the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored, and so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, and so Eve was created. Thus boredom entered the world, and increased in proportion to the increase of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together, then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored
en famille;
then the population of the world increased, and the peoples were bored
en masse.
To divert themselves they conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens. This idea is itself as boring as the tower was high, and constitutes a terrible proof of how boredom gained the upper hand.

But man is misled if he thinks he can relieve boredom by what he sees when he travels. The only relief is to stay home, where the existing individual bores itself into inventiveness. And the littlest circumstances control our existence—“For example: a man who is tired of life and wants to throw himself into the Thames and is stopped at the decisive moment by the sting of a gnat.” But this does not deprive man of his humanity. “The task of the subjective thinker is to transform himself into an instrument that clearly and definitely expresses in existence whatever is essentially human.”

This existential emphasis is wonderfully concrete. The classic parable of the terrifying responsibilities of existence is the story of God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac to prove his faith. For God’s demand violated all the accepted rules of morals and of religious, civil, and family law. Did God have a right to demand such an immoral act of Abraham? And if so, did Abraham have a right to obey the command? Abraham faced a dreadful choice, a personal responsibility. Was there a “higher law” that overrules the moral law? Is there such a thing as what theologians call “the teleological suspension of the ethical”? Abraham seemed ready to act as if he believed so. But God rescued Abraham from the awful choice by providing a ram in the thicket to replace the sacrifice of Isaac. This parable became embodied in the Hebrew conscience as a divine command against human sacrifice.

Kierkegaard viewed himself as a religious writer, a missionary aiming to bring Christianity back into Christendom. With his refined sensibility and subjectivity, it is no wonder that he found himself violently at odds with the established Church of Denmark, whose clergy had become mere civil servants, while the Danish Court Preacher was a champion of the Hegelian absolute. Against these false Christians, Kierkegaard led a crusade so passionate and strenuous that it wore him to death at forty-two. He finally spent his fortune on a polemical antiestablishment periodical,
The Moment,
to which he was the only contributor. And he left his few personal effects to the jilted Regine, who was by then the wife of the governor of the Danish West Indies.

Kierkegaard’s vision of the dilemma of existence, which gave reality to human life, would enlist creative disciples in the century to follow—a stellar array including Nietzsche and Sartre. Those who would call themselves—or would be called—Existentialists were among the most probing and widely influential writers of the West. Their grand theme was carried in Kierkegaard’s most important (and most voluminous) work,
Either/Or
(1843). This was his heartfelt cry against the optimism of the Romantics who had dominated Western literature in the early years of the century. The title of this book, it has been said, is more important than the book itself. Its two volumes were arcane and elusive, but the title carried the simple message that existence was the life of choice. And it was a plain challenge to the fashionable philosophy of Hegel, which saw history as an endless mediation—always somehow preserving “thesis” and “antithesis” in a synthesis that reconciled the opposites.

Kierkegaard the Seeker saw that the bland and cheerful affirmations of the Romantics did not touch the experience that alerted and awakened man to his existence—pain, sickness, frustration, and death. How far was all this from the encompassing Absolute simplicities of Hegel:

If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or do not marry, you will regret both. Laugh at the world’s follies, you will regret it; weep over them, you will also regret that; laugh at the world’s follies or weep over them, you will regret both; whether you laugh at the world’s follies or weep over them, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it, believe her not, you will regret both; whether you believe a woman or believe her not, you will regret both. Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the sum and substance of all philosophy.

Kierkegaard found a characteristically original way of describing man’s dilemma in what is sometimes called the first work of depth psychology. This was
The Concept of Dread
(1844), which concludes in a chapter declaring “Dread as a means of Salvation in conjunction with faith.” So he saw the poignancy of existence as an array of possibilities.

From Truth to Streams of Consciousness with William James

There would be relief from the anguish of existence. The challenge of individual life could produce something other than Kierkegaard’s dread. The promise of experience found an eloquent and peculiarly American prophet in William James (1862-1910). A clue to the difference between existentialist dread and pragmatic hope was their ways of thinking about the current of daily experience, their ways of seeking the meaning of life.

Kierkegaard had noted with dismay that “Repetition is not possible.” He recounts that this cosmic truth was impressed on him by the disappointing experience of returning to a theater in Berlin to enjoy once again a comedian he had seen there before.

Beckmann was unable to make me laugh. I held out for half an hour and then left the theater. “There is no such thing as repetition,” I thought. This made a profound impression upon me. . . . I still believed that the enjoyment I once had in that theater ought to be of a more durable kind, precisely for the reason that before one could really get a sense of what life is one must have learnt to put up with being disappointed by existence in many ways, and still be able to get along—but surely with this modest expectation life must be the more secure. Might existence be even more fraudulent than a bankrupt? After all, he pays back 50 per cent or 30 per cent, at least he pays something. The comical is after all the least one can demand—cannot even that be repeated?

For William James, on the contrary, this lack of repetition was the very spice of life.

James would give a name to this fluid, dynamic nature of experience. He would call it “the stream of consciousness.” His suggestive metaphor would be fertile in philosophy, psychology, and literature in the following century. For James it would be a way of describing human freedom, the promise of experience—and his way of denying a static “block universe.” “Reasoning” for James, unlike the scholastics, would not be a process for arriving at empyrean truths, but simply the “ability to deal with novel data.” James’s homely metaphor would rescue the processes of thought from the arcanum of theology and pedantry: